Avvenire, by Elisabetta Carrà: The loss of Sunday creates new temporal inequalities and makes gender inequalities visible, challenging society to consider how to protect and make shared time more equitable. This is a reflection that is anything but nostalgic or confessional.
For a long time, Sunday was the only truly “different” day from the work and school week. Then, gradually, this protected time was joined by a non-working Saturday for many sectors, and subsequently even schools reduced attendance to five days. The “different days” thus became two, marking an important transition, reinforcing the idea of the weekend as a time dedicated not only to individual rest but to communal life, albeit characterized by significant differences between the two non-working days: Saturday remained largely a “hybrid” day, marked by the opening of shops, while Sunday retained its character as a collectively suspended time, with quieter cities and a shared slowing of social rhythms. Today, the extension of Sunday opening hours, the flexibilization of working hours, and the society of seven-day-a-week services tend to erase even this distinction. The risk is that the “special” days are no longer two, but none. When there is no longer a time collectively recognized as different, shared time dissolves into a sum of individual availabilities, difficult to reconcile. And it is precisely in this transition that Sunday gradually loses its value as a shared temporal space. Sunday is not simply a day of rest (which can be replaced by any other day of the week) or a cultural custom, but represents one of the few moments in which individual time can synchronize and the family can exist as a concrete unit of relationships, and not just as the sum of personal agendas. In this sense, Sunday represents a public relational good: a social resource that supports parenthood, solidarity between generations, and family and community cohesion.
Research shows that time spent together on weekends, and especially on Sundays, is qualitatively different from that on weekdays. It’s less fragmented, less preoccupied with obligations, and more relationship-oriented: shared meals, conversations, playing with children, visiting relatives and grandparents. It’s not just about “having more time,” but a different kind of time, more continuous and symbolically charged, in which family memories and a sense of belonging are built. For children, it’s often a time of adults’ “full presence,” unmediated by the pressures of work. This means that working on Sundays doesn’t just mean losing a day of rest, but also losing access to shared time. This gives rise to a new form of temporal inequality: not everyone has the same opportunity to share time with their family. Holiday work is concentrated in sectors such as retail, healthcare, assistance, tourism, and logistics, and more often affects people with less autonomy over their schedules and less bargaining power. This disrupts the synchronization of family time, reduces opportunities for shared life, and transforms Sunday from shared time to residual time. Furthermore, another factor that further complicates the discussion should not be overlooked: having Sunday as a “holiday” does not automatically lead to equity. Surveys on time use clearly show that for many women, Sunday also remains a day of work: cooking, caring, organizing family life, managing parental relationships. Shared time, therefore, is not neutral. Its relational potential is distributed asymmetrically and can continue to reproduce gender inequalities, highlighting how invisible family work remains structurally unbalanced.
This means that reflecting on Sunday is not just about defending the existence of shared time, but also about questioning how this time is inhabited, by whom, and under what conditions. Sunday can be a space of unity, but it can also become a space where unequal workloads and responsibilities are concentrated. Therefore, reflection on Sunday is neither nostalgic nor confessional. It is not about longing for an idealized past, but about recognizing that shared time is a fragile and precious social resource, which must be protected and made more equitable. Where shared time is weakened, the fragmentation of relationships and the difficulty of coordinating among family members increase; where it remains unequal, profound imbalances in roles and life burdens continue to be reproduced. Defending Sunday, then, means defending not only the possibility of being together, but the possibility of a less unequal, less fragmented, and richer family life of meaningful relationships.
This article was translated from Italian.
Prophetic Link:
“Heretofore those who presented the truths of the third angel’s message have often been regarded as mere alarmists. Their predictions that religious intolerance would gain control in the United States, that church and state would unite to persecute those who keep the commandments of God, have been pronounced groundless and absurd. It has been confidently declared that this land could never become other than what it has been—the defender of religious freedom. But as the question of enforcing Sunday observance is widely agitated, the event so long doubted and disbelieved is seen to be approaching, and the third message will produce an effect which it could not have had before.” Great Controversy, 605.3
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